Untitled An Epilogue of Sorts to DH
by Holl-e-wood
Summary: What happens after we die? Well, some say we meet our maker... A Severus Snape story.


_It's the eternal question: what happens after we die?_

_Well, some say we meet out maker…_

Severus Snape, fictional character, strode with billowing robes and a frown through the pages of the seventh Harry Potter novel. He paused at the first chapter, watching himself watch Charity Burbage. He hesitated in his walk when he overheard Harry Potter scoffing at his detention assignments. He watched the silver doe for a long time. And then he watched himself die.

Jo, he thought, we need to talk.

They were, with the precision and clarity of swift-changing dreams, abruptly in Severus' old potions classroom; the headmaster portrait of Albus Dumbledore was on the wall next to his desk, and the chairs from the headmaster's office awaited Severus and his creator. Severus took Dumbledore's chair, as it was behind the desk, and watched as Jo sat slowly down across from him, watching him intently in return. Dumbledore's portrait smiled brightly at them both and promptly fell, or perhaps only pretended to fall, fast asleep.

"So," said J.K. Rowling.

"It was very sudden," Severus commented, almost neutrally.

"Yes," Jo admitted.

"I suppose I had almost thought to have the luxury Dumbledore had, to see it coming far in advance. Instead I died in the Shrieking Shack, where I was almost dead—or a werewolf—years before, with only seconds to see it coming, and with a moment of total despair when I thought I would not be able to tell Potter what he needed to know. I was bitten," he added, with an obvious effort to remain in the polite tones of neutrality, "bitten and bled to death by a giant, repulsive snake." He added pointedly, "I hate that snake."

Jo gave a tiny shrug and half-smile, spreading her hands as if to say—Well…

"Jo. The Shrieking Shack?" There was both disgust and exasperation in his voice, but he did not sound terribly harsh.

"You were a terrible bully. Poor Neville."

His voice was dry as bone. "Well, I can certainly see how that necessitates death by giant snake. Yes, it's all perfectly clear now."

"You know that's not why it happened. But still. Why did you bully the poor boy so?"

Severus fixed her with an impassive, unshakable stare. "Don't you know?"

"You would seem," she replied with a passable imitation at his own dry, sarcastic tone, "to have taken on a life of your own." She paused, adding, almost as an afterthought, "As all good characters do."

"But this is still your imagining."

"Is it? If wand lore is so murky and complicated, I shouldn't begin to try and fathom the intricacies of the magic concerned with authors and books and writing."

There was a short pause, as the woman and the man considered each other.

"Neville," Severus said after a bit, "turned out to be very strong, and very capable. Like his parents."

"If still not, perhaps, so capable at potions."

"No one is perfect, of course. Not the Chosen One. Not even—" his tone changed, subtly, and Jo was not sure she could read it properly—"the potions master."

There was another pause. Then—

"You had to have a difficult life, Sev," Jo said quietly. "Or you would not have been who you needed to be."

They both stopped a moment, considering just who it was Severus Snape had been.

Severus rolled up his sleeve and studied the ugly marking there on his left arm. As the thoughts had come through Jo's mind, so his memories stood out clearly to him, parading naked and unadorned and as solidly real as anything else in that room from start to finish.

"You died looking into her eyes," Jo said, as though she could read his thoughts.

"I never had any love for Harry Potter. He was his father's son. Why did I give him _all_ those memories?"

"Don't you know?"

They regarded each other again.

Jo ventured, after a time, "You spent a lot of time with Albus Dumbledore." She did not glance at the portrait on the wall. "You must have learned something from him."

"About understanding, and acceptance, and healing, I suppose." There was another silence, in which hung the obvious missing word, the word neither of them spoke.

"Albus understood you, Sev."

"You should not call me Sev." His black eyes met her eyes, and he shook his head slightly, just once, left to right. "You do not understand me. You have written me, and you have written the only two people who ever did understand me, but it was them you understood. Not me."

"And yet I wrote you."

"You did."

Another few moments—or was it hours? days?—went by, while Severus Snape (but never Sev, never for anyone else, that was for _her_,) pondered the phrase, "a life of his own."

"There could never have been a truly happy resolution for you. You know that. Perhaps better than I. Death was… inevitable."

Severus looked around his potions room. "Is this death, then? I can certainly see what the Dark Lord feared. An eternity of slimy things pickling in jars. Perhaps he was channeling Potter as often as it was the other way around…"

His voice, ever soft, trailed away. Jo's chair was empty. There was a different feel to the room, somehow.

"If this is death…"

There were cauldrons in the corner; a classroom full of resources entirely without the debilitating presence of students; and time enough to think, before he ventured out to the other parts of the castle, before he revisited other pages, other books. Time enough to consider who it was he had been; who he was.

He rested his chin in his palm, elbow on the desk, lost in musings. Professor Severus Snape, Potions Master…

The atmosphere of the room changed subtly. He arose swiftly from Dumbledore's chair, as though it had been long planned exactly this way, and began preparations for the first potion that came to mind, the most difficult, fiddly one he could conceive. Time enough to think…

And Jo, with the last thread of her mind still connected to the dream, or whatever it had been, watched Professor Snape at work, and smiled.


End file.
